


kämppisten

by scribe-tuesday (Leofuller)



Series: Back Up There [17]
Category: Original Work
Genre: M/M, Not the NHL
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-06-29 03:15:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,972
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15720852
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leofuller/pseuds/scribe-tuesday
Summary: and they were roommates...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [McSpot](https://archiveofourown.org/users/McSpot/gifts).



> ~~Some people deserve~~ Everybody deserves a happy ending.

The trouble with sisters is that even when they’re looking out for you they’re still _really annoying._

Eli knows that Marja means well, but she’s refused to actually listen to what he’s saying for months now.

He’s not fleeing the country because of a broken heart, and she just won’t believe him.

It’s endlessly frustrating, her insistence that he’s suffering in romantic pain and that he’s protesting too much when he tells her that, really, he’s fine.

Eli’s not broken hearted. The breakup was written on the wall for a long time before it actually happened, and it was entirely mutual. He misses being in a relationship, but he doesn’t miss being in a relationship _with Mikko._ And if he gets a little flustered or grumpy when he runs into Mikko and his new boyfriend in a coffee shop or at the grocery store, it’s not that he’s jealous of the new guy, it’s that he’s jealous that they get to have their relationship in public if they want to.

If Mikko broke up with the new guy and called Eli and told him he still loved him and wanted to get back together, Eli would politely and truthfully tell him that he’s not interested.

He’s not fleeing anything, but if he was it would be his interfering sister and not the shadows of a relationship that ended ten months ago.

 

And actually, his agent suggested this move. It wasn’t Eli’s idea to leave Finland. He’d mentioned in passing that he might be persuaded to play for a team in a different region, but he hadn’t thought about overseas, not even Sweden really, let alone Scotland.

But Niko suggested this, and when Eli took some time to think about it, it’s not a bad idea.

A fresh start, away from Marja’s smothering concern.

Eli’s bags vanish along the conveyor belt behind the Finnair check-in desk, and he takes his boarding pass and passport.

_“Enjoy your flight. Next, please.”_

 

Eli’s not kidding himself that things are going to be different in Scotland. If hockey’s homophobic in one of the world’s most LGBT friendly countries, hockey’s homophobic everywhere and his new team won’t want him strolling through the city hand-in-hand with another man any more than his previous team did.

Not that he asked, of course, but it’s never really about the current team. Maybe in one season there’s a GM and a room and a fan base that don’t care, but as soon as you’re open about it you have to have a GM and a room and a fan base that support you in every team you ever play for, every season for the rest of your career, or that career is going to be shorter than it might otherwise have been. You can’t reverse coming out.

Mikko didn’t want to be a secret. Neither of them really wanted public displays of affection, they’re both Finnish after all, but Mikko wanted the option. Eli would like the option too, but he wants hockey more, and that was just one of the cracks in their relationship.

If he was running away from reminders of his failed relationship, going to a country where the people are less reserved wouldn’t help. Eli’s likely to see more gay couples being open in public, not less, if only because there will be more couples behaving affectionately in public in general. The fact that none of those couples will contain his ex-boyfriend really won’t be relevant.

Anyway, if Marja thinks that he’s going to Scotland for a fresh chance to fall in love, she’s wrong, because he can’t be a gay hockey player anywhere, not this far from retirement age. Eli’s only 23, he can’t come out until he’s old. At _least_ 30.

 

When he bought the ticket the pros of a direct flight strongly outweighed the cons of the early check in time. Eli’s now regretting this a little, although not as much as he’d regret a multi-stop flight during layovers. Transferring all his gear from an international to a domestic flight in London has to be worse than this. Right?

His research suggests that it’ll be impossible to get a proper breakfast in Scotland, that the local food is weird and also always fried, so he makes the most of the hour he has before his gate is announced to fill up on proper bread that actually has some flavour, and drinks as much coffee as he can get away with.

It’s before 7am, he can justify a lot of coffee.

 

He’s jittery on the flight. It’s just under three hours from Helsinki to Edinburgh. Three hours from a city that might not be home but is at least familiar to his entry point to a place that’s entirely alien. Eli got good marks in English at school, he’s got a Humanities degree, he’ll be able to communicate. He’s done his military service, he knows how to look after himself. He’s been living away from his family for long enough. The only difference is that he’ll be 2000 kilometres away and a couple of hours by air instead of a couple of hours by road.

It’s the coffee making him jittery, that’s all.

 

Eli’s headed straight for the toilets on arrival in every international airport he’s ever landed at, and today is no exception.

 

Due to the time difference, it’s still not even ten am when he’s rescued his bags and shuffled out through the blue customs channel. Eli spent a little too much time back home planning this part of his journey, pouring over the bus timetables to work out how close the airport bus runs to his new home and whether he needs to change buses or if he can walk.

He’s got a massive suitcase, his gear bag and his sticks. He’s getting a taxi.

 

With the exception of the guy who checked his passport, who is probably supposed to be stern and suspicious as part of his job, everybody seems friendly. People have smiled at him when he made eye contact, the lady in the shop where he bought a bottle of water called him _dear_ , and the people in the taxi queue have given him a confusing and conflicting range of things he absolutely has to do while he’s in the city.

The accent’s not what he was expecting, although it’s not as hard to understand as he’d feared. His friends kept sending him incomprehensible videos, but either they were a joke or this part of the country isn’t so bad. Maybe they’re just used to foreigners.

There’s a couple a little way ahead of him in the taxi queue, both girls, comfortable in their affection for each other and clearly not just good friends. Eli’s idly wondering where they’ve travelled from, because they both look tired and have the slightly dazed air of people who’ve just given up on time zones entirely, when one of them catches him staring. She narrows her eyes, like she’s daring him to have a problem, and he manages to find a smile. Maybe there’s some way she can tell that he’s the last person who’d have a problem with same-sex couples, because after a moment she smiles back.

Eli wipes his sweaty palms on his jeans and pushes his luggage trolley a few metres further forwards as the queue shuffles along.

 

The taxi ride is… an experience. It’s not the scariest ride he’s ever had, the driver is sticking mostly to the speed limit so far as Eli can tell, and apart from the disorientation of everything being on the wrong side of the road and the amount of cars everywhere, he’s not getting the life-flashing-before-his-eyes moments he’s had on holiday in Rome and Paris.

It’s just that the driver doesn’t stop talking the whole time. He takes the address Eli’s been given for the apartment he’s moving into, literally takes Eli’s phone out of his hand so he can plug the address into the system, and then he just starts speaking.

Eli doesn’t understand a word of it. Maybe one word in seven.

Please don’t let them all be like this, he’s never going to survive the season.

It feels like a lot longer than half an hour has passed when the taxi pulls up on street of tall grey-brown buildings. It seems nice, nicer than it looked on the internet, although that might just be because the building work caught by the google maps cameras has obviously finished. These are clearly old buildings designed as houses for the wealthy and converted into apartments, but it seems like people look after them.

The driver says something incomprehensible and Eli gives him some money.

 

At least one of Eli’s new flatmates is supposed to already be in residence, and he’s supposed to know that Eli’s coming so he’ll be here to let him in and give him his keys, but it’s still nerve-wracking to press the buzzer for apartment 2b and hope that the instructions were correct.

The intercom crackles. “Come on up!”

The lock clunks open, and Eli pushes inside with all his gear, letting the door swing closed behind him. It’s probably safe here, in a locked building, so Eli puts his sticks down by the bottom of the stairs, shifts his kit bag more firmly over his shoulder and starts dragging his case upstairs.

He’s met in the doorway of 2b by a very confused guy with a lot of hair and hardly any clothes. He looks like he’s just woken up.

“You’re not the Tesco delivery.”

Eli stares at him. Clearly he’s not any kind of delivery guy, whatever a Tesco might be.

“Shit! Sorry, you’re Elias! I’m…”

Eli can literally see the moment the guy realises what he’s wearing, or rather not wearing.

“I’ll be right back.”

He vanishes into the apartment. Eli pauses for a moment, and then concludes that this is definitely the right place, even if he wasn’t expecting a mostly-naked welcome. He goes far enough into the apartment to put down his bags, wedging the door open with his suitcase to make sure he doesn’t get locked out, and goes back for his sticks.

He knows the names of the two guys he’s going to be living with this season, but he’s only seen roster shots of them. Neither of them had such wild hair, and neither of them were topless, and he’s not 100% sure which one he’s just met.

 

When he gets back upstairs with his sticks, there’s a strong smell of deodorant and his flatmate has just come out of what must be his bedroom, now wearing sweats and a t-shirt and wrestling his hair back into an elastic. It makes him look a lot more like his roster photo.

“Hi.” He says, once his hair is under control and his hands are free. “I’m Rob. I make terrible first impressions.”

He makes _excellent_ first impressions, or at least his abs do, but Eli probably shouldn’t say that.

“I knew you were due in this morning, but I was planning to be dressed, and actually have some food in the place…” Rob tugs Eli’s case away from the door so that he can close it, and leads him into the kitchen. “Tesco are literally due any time, which is why I just opened the door without asking, I promise I’m normally much better at security, but right now I’ve only got cold pizza and Irn Bru which is not how you’re supposed to welcome somebody to a new country.”

He pauses. “Well. I think maybe the Irn Bru is, actually, I got some thrust at me within about ten minutes of my first call up, but anyway. Sorry.”

He finally stops talking long enough to smile at Eli, and Eli’s heart thumps. Oh, shit, he’s not supposed to be attracted to teammates.

“Anyway, Alex isn’t here yet, and he’s a rookie so you should get first pick of the bedrooms anyway. Um. I lived here last year, too, so-”

“So you already have a room.” Rob played here last season, and the season before if Eli remembers what he read on elite prospects correctly. He’s a year older than Eli, too, and he could probably have claimed first pick of the rooms on either count, but Eli really doesn’t care anyway. He would just like to see where he’s going to be living.

“Yeah.” Rob seems to relax a little bit, like he wasn’t sure if Eli was going to be easy to get along with.

Eli tries to be easy to get along with. He wants his new teammates to like him.

He wants _Rob_ to like him.

“So.” Rob prepares to set off on a short tour of the apartment. “This is the kitchen, obviously.” He pauses. “I know I said we’ve got nothing but Irn Bru, but I still feel like a terrible host if I don’t at least offer you a drink, so, would you like one?”

There’s a large bottle of some kind of fizzy drink on the kitchen counter. It’s an alarming shade of orange.

“What is the flavour?” It looks like it might not be safe to drink.

Rob laughs. “Irn Bru. It tastes like… Irn Bru.” He opens a cupboard and gets down a couple of glasses, half-filling one of them. “Do you want to try it?”

Eli’s never backed down from a challenge in his life and he’s not going to start now, so he takes the glass and drinks the contents.

His face must say exactly what he thinks, because Rob starts to laugh. “Sorry, sorry, just, your face!”

“It’s…” Eli tries to find a word for what he just drank, and fails.

“It grows on you.”

Eli blinks at him. That’s probably idiomatic, he’s not going to literally start turning orange…

“Sorry, I mean, you get to like it?”

“Oh, okay.” Eli’s not sure that that’s going to happen. He fills his glass at the tap to wash away the taste.

“So, kitchen.” Rob gestures at the room and immediately leads him back out into the hallway. “Living room.” Opposite the kitchen, it’s a big room with large windows and a couple of very comfortable looking couches. There’s also an enormous TV screen, and Rob might not have been here long enough to buy food but he’s managed to set up a games console.

“That’s my room.” Rob gestures to a half-closed door as they pass. It’s dark inside, curtains still closed, but Eli gets the impression that Rob unpacks by just opening his bags and tipping them out.

“Bathroom. We’ve only got one but it wasn’t a problem last year.” It’s clean and modern, anyway, not too tiny.

“And then you can take either of these.” Rob pushes open the doors to both of the remaining bedrooms. They’re both big enough for a double bed and a wardrobe, but one of them’s got more floor space than the other and that’s probably the one that Eli’s going to take.

There’s a buzzing sound from the hallway that makes Eli jump.

“That should actually be the Tesco delivery this time.” Rob disappears without explaining what a Tesco is, and Eli gets a second on his own to make a choice about bedrooms.

 

He picks the bigger room, between Rob’s room and the living room, and moves his things through. The bed’s a double, with drawers underneath, and the wardrobe is a standard IKEA build. The bed has been made up, so Eli lifts his case onto it ready to unpack, listens to Rob laughing in the hallway and reminds himself that he only knows one person here so far and it’s best not to fuck it up by finding him attractive.

He opens his case, looks at the contents and decides to unpack later.

 

Rob’s in the kitchen unpacking a crate of groceries, and the delivery guy is bringing in a second crate. Eli’s going to go ahead and assume that Tesco is a grocery store.

Rob’s mostly piling things on the countertops at the moment, so Eli goes to see if he can help.

“I didn’t know if you or Alex have any favourites or allergies so I got the basics to get us started.” Rob explains, looking a bit awkward. At least that answers the questions Eli had about whether they all had to get their own food.

“Looks good.” Eli’s seen meat, and vegetables, and pasta. The essentials seem to be there.

“And-” Rob straightens the packages that he’s unloading. “I was just going to put everything where we used to have it last year, and then if you want to move stuff we can sort that out later?”

Eli shrugs. “Sure.” He’s probably not going to want to move anything, unless they keep anything in really stupid places. “It was your home first.”

“Yes, but.” Rob looks pleased, despite his protests. “It’s your home too, now.”

“That’s everything.” The delivery guy puts the crate he’s just brought in onto the table and starts emptying the contents onto the surface next to the crate.

“Thanks mate.” Rob takes the last few things out of the first crate and goes to help the delivery guy. Eli works his way around, identifying things that need to be cold and moving them over next to the fridge.

“Just moving back in?” The delivery guy seems to know Rob. Maybe he delivered to them before?

“Training starts next week.” Rob relaxes straight into conversation. “I got in yesterday, Eli got here about half an hour ago. I’d just woken up when he buzzed and thought he was you, so I just opened the downstairs door. I was going to grab a shirt and come and give you a hand, but I couldn’t work out what the noise of him bringing his case up was, so when he got here I was just standing here like a numpty in my boxers!” That’s a lot of information to share, so Rob must know this guy. Surely.

“He’s not Scottish.” The delivery guy addresses Eli, nodding in Rob’s direction. “Don’t go thinking we’re all idiots just because he doesn’t know how to get dressed.”

Eli isn’t sure what to say. He doesn’t think that Rob’s an idiot at all, but this is clearly a moment for chirping. “Sure.” He nods, like he’s taking it all very seriously. “It’s just Rob who’s an idiot.”

There’s a pause while what he’s said sinks in, and then Rob splutters and throws the packet in his hand at Eli’s head. Luckily it’s salad.

The delivery guy laughs. “Anyway, welcome to the team, lad.” The last items are out of the crate, and he stacks the empties. “This is very unprofessional and I’m not supposed to do this, but Rob said you’d just got here this morning?”

Eli nods.

“So would I be right in saying that you haven’t signed any autographs in Scotland yet?”

That’s not what Eli was expecting to hear.

“Uh, no.”

The delivery guy digs in his pockets. “I don’t suppose you’d… my son’s a big fan, we come to all the games, and-”

“Here.” Rob produces a flyer from somewhere, advertising the opening friendly games a couple of weeks from now, and hands Eli a sharpie. “This was with the post when I got in yesterday, but we probably don’t need the details…” He grins, and Eli uncaps the pen.

“What’s your son’s name, please?”

“Jake.”

_For Jake - my first autograph in Scotland! Eli #58_

“Thanks, lad, that’s tidy.”

Eli suspects that _tidy_ means something different to what he’d been taught. “You’re welcome.”

 

 _Tidy_ is not a great word to describe the kitchen as Rob shows the delivery guy out, so Eli starts loading perishables into the fridge. The only thing currently in the fridge is the pizza Rob mentioned earlier, so Eli moves that out onto the table while he loads the groceries in the same way he would back home - bottles in the door, vegetables in the drawer, raw meat on the lowest shelf, dairy towards the top.

“Oh, cheers.” Rob comes back in and starts immediately on the dry goods. “Hey, do you want a coffee, now that we’ve got some?”

“Yes! Please.”

Rob laughs. “I honestly think that’s the most enthusiasm you’ve shown for anything so far.”

Eli’s not sure if that’s a problem. Has he been rude?

Rob puts the pasta into a cupboard and shuts the door. “I know we’re not supposed to use stereotypes and so on, but Sami pretty much never showed any emotion at all the whole time I knew him, off the ice at least. I think he was just doing it to wind us up by the end of the season. Anyway, that reminds me, he sent me some details of….” He holds up a finger, like _hold that thought,_ and vanishes towards his bedroom.

Eli shrugs and starts piling frozen vegetables into the freezer.

“Here.” Rob reappears and shoves a piece of paper at him. It’s handwritten, in Finnish, a note from a player who left the team at the end of last season about where Eli will be able to buy things like rye bread in the city, where to go for a cup of coffee that tastes like home. He’s put his email address on the end, with a comment to get in touch if he’s got any questions that need a Finn to answer them.

“That’s…” Eli leans against the table, feeling a little bit homesick for the first time. “Thank you.”

“Just the messenger.” Rob smiles at him, and changes the subject like he knows that Eli needs to be distracted. “Once we’re done here I’ll show you where the towels and stuff are so that you can grab a shower, and then we can go into town if you want, get you a phone and show you where things are?” Eli starts to nod. He’s due to meet the team management tomorrow. “But first, you should probably take over making this coffee. Sami liked this brand but he said I always make it wrong.”

Eli does as prompted and goes over to where Rob’s putting a filter paper into the machine, takes the packet of coffee away from him and hunts for a spoon.

“Do I smell very bad?”

“Do you…. Huh?”

“If I need to shower. Do I smell very bad?” He starts measuring the coffee into the filter.

“Oh. No. Um. That wasn’t - I just meant - since you’ve been on a plane, I know I always want to…” Rob suddenly realises that Eli’s teasing, and elbows him in the ribs. Eli doesn’t spill any coffee, but it’s close. “You smell fine.”

There’s a little moment there where Eli wonders if Rob meant to say that. Is it normal for somebody to stand so close? Is that a Scottish thing- English. Rob’s English, not Scottish. Is it normal here, for somebody to be in what Eli is used to thinking of as his personal space? Rob’s a little bit shorter than him, and it just feels like he’d… fit. In Eli’s personal space. It feels like that might be okay.

And that’s not okay, because Rob is his teammate.

 

It’s been a very long day. Eli was at the airport really early, and with the time difference he basically got up at 2 o’clock this morning, Scottish time.

It’s not that late in the evening, not quite eight, but Eli’s just really tired. It’s been a very long day.

But he’s got his new home and a WiFi password, and he knows somebody here, and there’s food in the kitchen and Rob’s cooking is about as good as Eli’s, which is good enough to feed them day to day if not exactly on a par with family meals. He’s got a new phone, with a contract that makes texting Finland reasonable, and he’s working on copying across the contacts he actually wants to keep.

There’s no need to stay in the group chat for his old team. If it’s in his whatsapp profile it can stay, if he has to type it into the new phone then it needs to be important.

Marja calls as soon as he’s sent her his new number, of course.

_“Hello! How’s Scotland?”_

_“Good so far.”_ Eli starts trying to lever himself off the couch so that he can take the call into his bedroom.

“Don’t move on my account.” Rob pauses the TV. “I’m not really watching this and I don’t speak any Finnish.” He picks up their discarded plates and heads for the kitchen. Eli slumps back into the couch.

_“Who was that?”_

_“That’s Rob, my flatmate. Teammate. Goalie.”_

_“Robert Brooker?”_ Marja’s already looked all of his new teammates up online, but especially the two he’d been told he was going to live with.

 _“Mm.”_ Eli rolls his neck from side to side. He’s in danger of falling asleep on this couch and it’s going to kill his back.

_“What’s he like?”_

_“Seems like a nice guy.”_

Marja won’t want to hear about Rob’s smile and his abs, and anyway Eli doesn’t want to tell her that. Marja always reads too much into everything. Also, even if Eli was the kind of guy to talk about a guy to his sister, which he’s not, he’d never be comfortable doing it where that guy could hear him.

Even if he doesn’t speak Finnish.

_“Tell me everything, then!”_

_“Nothing to tell yet. I’ve moved into the apartment, I’ve got a new phone. I’m going to meet the coach tomorrow, and some of the guys have got the ice booked so I’ll get to skate a bit. That’s all.”_

_“Don’t hold out on me, baby brother.”_

_“I’m tired, Marja. It’s been a very long day. I’ll call you after the weekend when there’s maybe actually something to say.”_

She lets him go, obviously reluctantly, and Eli finally claws himself out of the couch and goes through to where Rob’s loading the dishwasher.

“That was quick.” Rob drops the last fork in and closes the door. “Girlfriend?”

“Sister.” Eli’s going to have the _do you have a girlfriend_ conversation multiple times, being on a new team. Sometimes it would be easier to pretend that there’s a girl back home, then he doesn’t have to find reasons to fend off the girls who want to sleep with hockey players. They have those here, too, probably.

“Oh, okay.”

Rob doesn’t seem like he’s going to ask, and oddly that’s what makes Eli volunteer. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Bachelor house, then.” Rob leans against the dishwasher, and it’s because Eli’s so tired that he thinks there’s something familiar in the way Rob says it, like it doesn’t mean quite what it should normally mean.

It’s a really fucking stupid idea to do this, but doing this early means he can blame it on a misunderstanding if it’s the wrong thing to do, say he was tired and his English is bad and he didn’t mean it the way it was interpreted, so-

“I don’t bring girls home.”

Rob straightens up slowly. “You can, you know, if you want.”

Eli shakes his head. “No. No girls.” There’s a subtle emphasis on _girls_ , and it just depends if Rob understands what he means-

“Oh.” Rob looks down at the floor, rubs at the back of his neck with one hand, looks back up at Eli. “Me neither. No girls.”

_Oh._

 

Eli has to live with Rob for the whole season.

Even if Rob is also into guys, even if Rob also understands that Eli can’t be public about being gay because the same unwritten rules apply to him, there are so many things that could go wrong. Eli can’t.

Eli shouldn’t lie in bed in the morning, wondering if Rob’s still asleep on the other side of the wall.

Eli shouldn’t think about Rob’s bare skin while he’s in the shower.

 

Eli’s spent every day since puberty arrived not looking at guys that way in the the locker room, not thinking about his teammates as anything more than the smelly idiots they are, but it’s still a relief to find himself, contract signed, sitting in his new locker room with a handful of guys from his new team, and to discover that _Rob_ at home and _Brooksy_ in the locker room are completely separate.

His mind might have wandered to _Rob_ while he was wielding the soap this morning, but he can actually see _Brooksy_ out of the corner of his eye when the guys are rinsing off after their informal training session and it’s just business as usual.

The knowledge of some of the ways Rob can fold himself when he’s stretching does resurface when he’s in bed that night, but the point is that his mind is clear of any inappropriate thoughts in the locker room, because Eli’s a professional and hockey’s more important than anything else.

 

Alex moves in on Sunday. He’s nineteen. He’s never lived away from his mother before. He’s never lived in a city this size before.

He’s a nice kid.

He moves into the smallest bedroom, asks polite questions about things like how to use the washing machine, and defers to them both when the subject of what to watch on TV comes up.

 

Yeah. That lasts about 48 hours.


	2. Chapter 2

“ALEX!” Rob pounds his fist against the bathroom door. “We’re leaving in ten minutes and we’ll go without you if you’re not ready!”

The door opens and Alex breezes out. “Okay, okay, no need to fuss.”

Eli darts in to clean his teeth. Alex’s hair products are spread out around the sink, although his hair certainly doesn’t look like it’s had twenty minutes worth of effort focused on it.

As his electric toothbrush whirs, Eli uses his free hand to pull open the drawer on the storage unit that they bought _specifically for this purpose, Alex,_ and once his toothbrush is back in the charger he picks quickly through the various items and drops all of Alex’s things into the drawer. It’s tempting to just sweep everything off in one go, but Alex has a habit of not putting the lids back on things properly and that doesn’t always end well.

Eli didn’t lock the bathroom door, didn’t even close it properly because it’s not like brushing his teeth needs privacy, and Rob ducks in to look for a comb.

Considering the special treatment that Rob’s hair requires, and the amount of money he spends on fancy conditioner, he’s really bad at keeping track of the wide-toothed combs he needs. He’s got at least four and he can never find any of them.

Eli opens the third drawer of the storage unit (Rob gets the bottom drawer because he’s five centimetres shorter than Eli and three centimetres shorter than Alex, and because they ganged up on him to enforce it) and plucks out the blue plastic comb, dropping it in Rob’s hand and leaving the bathroom.

“Thank you!” Rob’s voice floats after him.

Alex rolls his eyes at him. “Aren’t you ready yet?”

“Somebody was blocking the bathroom.” Eli shoulder-checks him gently into the wall as he passes, just because. “Anyway, you’re not ready either.”

“Yes I am.”

“Jacket.” Eli reminds him, and Alex rolls his eyes again.

“I don’t need one.”

“Yes you do.” Eli does not understand the British obsession with refusing to dress for the weather. It’s not as cold here as it is at home, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to go out with just a shirt on. He puts his shoes on and grabs Alex’s jacket from the hooks by the door, throwing it at him so he has to catch it, and then picks up his own and Rob’s.

“Taxi’s here.” Rob comes out of the bathroom with his phone in his hand. “Are you guys-”

Alex is putting his jacket on with the slightly sulky expression that they like to laugh at. Eli hands Rob his jacket, and snags his keys from the shelf.

“Ready.”

 

Team nights out are always good fun. The boys have their favourite bars, and although they’re professional athletes and this is a hockey town, there are also a huge number of people in the city who don’t care at all about hockey and so there are loads of places where they can just be a group of guys out for some drinks.

They’re definitely not the first there, thanks to Alex, but they’re not the last and nobody expects them to be early for anything now that they’ve known Alex for a couple of months.

Apparently the price of the next round of drinks had been bet on whether Eli, Rob and Alex would make it to the bar before or after the Welsh defenseman who Eli’s secretly convinced is genuinely unable to tell the time.

Eli doesn’t mind being the subject of a bet like that, because whoever wins or loses, he’s getting a free drink out of it.

 

He doesn’t pick up when he’s out with the team. He doesn’t pick up at all, actually, not to the point of taking somebody home or going back to their place, but if he is going to flirt and dance, maybe steal a few kisses, he’s not going to do it when he’s surrounded by what Rob calls _the peanut gallery._ It’s partly about not being observed by the team, and partly because if there’s any chance he’s ever going to get recognised on a night out, it’ll be when he’s with the rest of the team. They’re more recognisable in groups.

Eli’s been recognised when he’s out with the team, and he’s been recognised shopping in town a few times which is always weird, but he’s never been recognised in one of the nightclubs in the student areas where he’s just another young guy with an accent.

Rob never picks up around the team, either. He doesn’t bring people home, but there was one morning when Eli was getting ready to go to the gym and Rob let himself into the flat in last night’s clothes, so.

Eli doesn’t think about that.

Anyway, nights out with the team mean having a few drinks, chirping the guys who try to pick up, chirping the guys who duck out early to go home to their wives, dancing and taking turns holding down a table with the guys in long distance relationships who don’t want to pick up but don’t want to go home early either.

 

“Here, you can have your rookie back now.” Alex is poured into the seat next to them. He mumbles something indistinct to the table top and Eli opens a bottle of water for him.

“Drink.”

Alex mumbles something again, and Eli nudges the bottle against his hand until he takes it and starts drinking.

“What if we don’t want him back?” Rob shouts over the music.

“Tough. You’re like his dads.”

“I’m like, five years older than him.” Rob protests. “And Eli’s younger than me!”

“Still his dads. You’re like… his gay dads.”

Eli’s heart pounds, but he doesn’t react outwardly. Years of letting gay comments roll over him like they would if he didn’t have any kind of personal feelings about them make this second nature. It doesn’t feel like it’s meant negatively, not like there’s an issue with being a gay dad rather than a straight dad, it’s just that there are two of them and they’re both guys, so that’s the dynamic that their teammate comes up with. It’s still a bit… close.

“Okay, yes, you’re right.” Rob scoots closer, right up next to Eli, and throws his arm around Eli’s shoulders. “Wait, that’s not quite how... You’re taller, hang on…”

He rearranges them so that it’s Eli with his arm around Rob. “We’d rather be at home watching _Gardener’s World,_ but we have to come out to supervise you lot and make sure you don’t corrupt our son.”

Eli tries to look like this is normal, like they’re just joking around and he doesn’t care at all about how well Rob fits under his arm, like he doesn’t have any desire at all to play with Rob’s hair.

Alex hiccups. “God, you’re so embarrassing.”

He sound _exactly_ like a teenager complaining about his parents, and in the general laughter which follows the whole joke about Eli and Rob being a couple fades away like spilt beer.

 

As in, it’s a bit sticky.

 

They end up doing a little piece for the website, some lighthearted fluff featuring Rob, 24, and Eli, 23, looking out for Alex, 19.

Rob makes him toast at breakfast and cuts the slices into quarters while Eli’s heating porridge (it turns out that the Scots do have normal breakfast food).

Eli sorts a load of clean laundry - carefully pre-selected to be underwear-free - and leaves Alex’s shirts folded on the end of his untidy bed, shaking his head over the state of the room and collecting three mugs while he’s in there.

They go together to take Alex to a fabricated play-date, meeting up with one of the kids who’s played a couple of games for them but mostly ices for their SNL team so that Alex can play table tennis while Eli and Rob drink coffee with the other rookie’s mother. It’s actually quite good fun.

Nobody makes any gay comments, of course, and the PR people are cheerfully pushing a _best friends_ narrative.

 

*

 

Despite being an age-appropriate walking disaster in most things, there are a couple of areas where Alex has his life together. He’s a better cook than either Rob or Eli, for one thing, and although nobody says it out loud he’s probably better at hockey. Well, better than Eli was at nineteen, anyway. Eli’s a better player than Alex is right now, but Alex probably has more potential. It’s not fair to compare him to Rob because goalie development is totally different.

Alex also has a serious girlfriend. It’s long-distance at the moment, she’s at university further north and so she comes down for games some weekends, or Alex goes up to see her midweek if there’s a gap in games and training sessions, but they’re clearly pretty settled in each others’ company and Alex is far less of a idiot in the way he treats her and the way he approaches their relationship than Eli would expect from a kid of his age.

 

“I just don’t think it’s fair that you have to have the smallest bedroom.” Lucie’s here for the weekend. She and Alex are watching something on Netflix in the living room, and they don’t realise that they can be overheard from the kitchen.

“Why not? I’m the youngest and I was the last one to get here.”

Rob’s doing the washing up. Eli’s portioning out ingredients for protein shakes so that they can make them faster in the morning. They’re doing this in silence, so that they can eavesdrop more easily.

“Yes, but it’s daft, isn’t it? I mean, Eli could just move into Rob’s room, and then we could have Eli’s room.”

“But then where would Rob sleep?”

Eli doesn’t need to be able to see Alex in order to picture the confused expression on his face.

“In his room?”

“But you’ve just moved Eli in there.”

“Yes, but…” Lucie’s patient, explaining it to him. “They’re, you know, aren’t they?”

Eli can’t help looking at Rob, even though that’s clearly a bad idea. Rob’s looking back at him, and their eyes lock. They’re not, _you know,_ and it should be awkward to overhear this.

“No…?”

“I thought they were, like… Together.” It’s Lucie’s turn to sound confused.

“No. That’s just a joke, that they’re like my dads. Because they nag me all the time.”

Eli can’t break the eye contact with Rob. It feels heated, charged. In this moment, Rob’s got to be thinking about Eli the same way that Eli’s thinking about Rob, and neither of them know what to do about it.

“I honestly thought that they were together. Like, have been for ages, past the stage where they’re all handsy, you know.”

“I’m pretty sure they only met two days before I got here.”

“Wow.”

The moment stretches, and then there’s a giggle from the other room which suggests that even though they’ve been a couple since before they were really old enough to know what that meant, Alex and Lucie are not past the _handsy stage_ themselves.

Rob turns his attention sharply back to the soapy water in front of him.

Eli snaps lids onto the tupperware with slightly more force than really necessary.

 

When Eli lays in bed later that night, listening to Alex and Lucie further demonstrate their lack of awareness of how sound travels in the flat, he can’t help wondering if Rob’s also being kept awake by the squeaky bedsprings, whether he’s lying on the other side of the wall thinking about Eli.

 

*

 

New Year’s Eve starts with an overtime win, moves on to a house party, and descends into the kind of atmosphere that celebrates not having another game until Friday. New Year is a big deal in Scotland, _Hogmanay_ , they call it, and Eli’s happy to join his adoptive country in celebrating.

He’s great until midnight’s approaching, and then he’s busy carefully avoiding the girl who’s been showing up near him all night, whilst also fighting the swell of jealousy he always feels when other people are encouraged to kiss in public.

Midnight itself finds him in the middle of the guys who haven’t got somebody to kiss, either because they can’t be with their girls tonight or because there’s just nobody here they feel lucky about.

Rob’s somewhere in the same group hug.

 

It gets old pretty fast after that. Eli’s already feeling sad, lonely and a little bit homesick, and the drunkenness around him isn’t making him feel any better. It’s actually a relief when Rob finds him a little after 1am.

“I’m taking Alex home.” He explains. “He’s has too much to drink. I managed to get us a cab, do you want to come with or are you staying?”

“I’ll come too.” It might be hard to get another cab later, and also he just kind of wants to go home.

 

Alex is sitting on the front steps of the house with somebody Eli doesn’t recognise.

“Okay, time to go.” Rob’s gone on ahead to open the car door, so Eli gets Alex onto his feet to the obvious relief of the girl who was sitting with him. “Are you going to be sick?”

Alex shakes his head, very carefully, and Eli hopes that he’s right.

 

Alex isn’t sick in the taxi. There’s a close moment in the stairwell at home, while Eli holds him up and hopes for the best and Rob runs on ahead to get the door open, but they make it all the way to the bathroom before Alex really starts to regret his choices.

They prop him up next to the toilet. Eli goes to fetch some water for all of them while Rob keeps an eye on him.

The bright lights in the kitchen make everything feel surreal.

 

“I try not to do this.” Rob accepts the water that Eli brought for him, not looking away from where Alex seems to be in that awkward stage where he’s finished throwing up but isn’t sure if it’s safe to move yet. “I hate being sick when I’m actually ill, I don’t want to throw up when it’s self inflicted and I could just… not be that drunk.” Rob shrugs, and probably feels like he needs to make a joke to lighten the mood. “And I need somebody to look after me, you know, hold my hair back.”

“I’d hold your hair back.” Eli’s mouth says, without consulting his brain. “If you needed me to.”

“You would?” Rob turns to look at him.

“Yeah.” Eli’s legs decide that they don’t need to listen to his brain either, and he steps forwards so that he’s right next to Rob. Any second now he’s going to just reach out and touch Rob’s hair. This is such a bad idea, but he’s having a hard time convincing himself of that right now.

Alex grumbles something, and flails a hand around looking for the flush.

“I’ve got you.” Rob deals with flushing the toilet and helping Alex to get up. Eli handles getting him to take a few careful sips of water, and between them they persuade him to rinse his mouth out with watered-down Listerine.

It’s pretty much the least romantic setting anybody could come up with.

 

They put Alex to bed, getting him out of his jeans because he’s going to feel rough enough when he wakes up without the addition of sleeping in denim and it’s not like they haven’t seen him in and out of his underwear in the locker room anyway.

Eli leaves the glass of water on the table by the bed. Rob finds a bucket from somewhere and leaves it within easy reach, and together they kick things carefully aside until there’s a clear path through the mess on the floor in case Alex wants to make a run for the bathroom.

“This parenting thing was supposed to be a joke.” Rob grumbles, leaving the door ajar so it’s easy to check on Alex later. “I wasn’t expecting actual babysitting.”

Eli shrugs. “We’d do the same whichever one of us needed it. Look after him tonight, chirp him tomorrow.”

“He’s going to be very hungover.”

“I might vacuum.”

Rob grins. “You’re evil.”

Eli smiles back. “Thank you.”

 

Eli doesn’t want to go to bed yet, and from the way Rob’s lingering it seems like he doesn’t want to either.

“Drink?”

“Yeah.” Rob smiles softly, and then looks down at himself. “I’m just going to change into something more comfortable, that doesn’t smell like Alex.”

Eli nods. That’s a good idea.

 

There’s still that surreal feeling in the air, as Eli changes into sweats and a long sleeved t-shirt and wanders through the flat in his socks, glad that they’d left the heating on while they were out. He makes a quick visit to the bathroom, checking while he’s there that there’s no nasty surprises from Alex and leaving the place smelling of citrus cleaner when he’s done, washes his hands and recovers the _kossu_ from its hiding place in his room. He doesn’t generally hide things away, Alex doesn’t like his bread and Rob wouldn’t help himself to something that Eli has to go halfway across the city to buy, and both of them pulled hilarious faces when he got them to try _salmiakki,_ but keeping his special occasion alcohol away from his flatmates is an old habit.

Rob’s in the kitchen, getting glasses.

“I’ve got a bottle of Glenkinchie I’ve been saving.” The whisky is sitting on the counter, and Rob’s obviously been saving it in the same way Eli saves his _kossu_ because the bottle’s about a third empty. He looks at the bottle in Eli’s hand and gets down two more glasses. “Ice?”

Eli shakes his head. Rob tucks the whisky under his arm, gathers the glasses together and heads for the living room. Eli shuts off the kitchen light behind them, leaving the room lit only by the spot over the stove.

 

Rob hasn’t bothered with the main lights in the living room, depositing his items on the cluttered coffee table and going to the tall lamp in the corner instead.

Eli adds the _kossu_ to the collection. Normally he sits on the other couch, that’s his regular spot, but this is more… intimate.

That is, he means, it makes sense for them both to sit within reach of the bottles. It’s practical.

 

Rob’s fiddling with the TV remote, flicking through the music playlists on the incredibly complicated setup that Eli’s never really tried to understand, so Eli pours them both a drink, starting with the familiarity of the _kossu_.

Rob puts the remote down, turning towards Eli on the sofa, and takes the glass. “Thanks.”

 

It’s…

They’re both sitting half turned towards one another, with only a cushion’s worth of space between them. Eli doesn’t know what’s happening. He doesn’t know if he wants to know what’s happening.

He’s scared.

Rob looks down at his drink, glances up at Eli and looks down again immediately when he realises that Eli’s watching him.

Maybe he’s scared too.

Eli doesn’t know what’s happening, but it feels like something’s about to change.

 

Rob wrinkles his nose as he takes a careful sip of the _kossu,_ and then smiles at Eli in surprise.

“Hey, that’s-”

“Nicer than vodka?”

“Yeah!”

Eli has to smile. Of course it’s better.

 

“Is this how you thought you’d spend Hogmanay?” Rob settles more comfortably onto the couch, one leg tucked under him so that he’s still angled towards Eli.

“Babysitting a drunk rookie?” Eli shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know how I thought I’d…” Spending midnight with a pile of his teammates and not with one significant person? Realistically, that’s exactly what he expected to be doing. “Probably.”

“It makes me a little…” Rob gestures vaguely with the hand that’s not holding a glass, and Eli fills in _reflective. Maudlin._ “Like, I was never going to…” his shoulders sag a little with the weight of the things they never get to say. “Not with the team.”

Rob’s not going to kiss a guy in a room full of his teammates, and even if he had somebody he’s not going to explain to his teammates that he’s ditching them and spending the evening with a person who’s significant enough for him to choose them over the team but who they’ve never met or really heard him talk about.

Eli took Mikko to a team party, two years ago, and they had to act like they were just friends except for a few stolen moments when they could find an empty room. Last year, of course, he could just go drinking with the team because there wasn’t any Mikko to take into account.

With the heavy curtains drawn against the night, and the lingering feeling that New Year should be a little bit magic, it feels like a night for sharing confidences.

“It was hard.” Eli shifts so that’s he’s mirroring Rob’s position, although he keeps his attention on his hands as he talks. “New Year. When I was with my ex. Because I wanted to be with my friends, and I wanted to be with him, and… it was hard to do both.” He slips the pronoun in there, finally picking up the conversation that they never finished on his first night here.

“I’ve never…” Rob falters, looking at his empty glass and then up at Eli just as Eli’s looking up at him. “I’ve never had a boyfriend at New Year’s.”

The word _boyfriend_ echos between them.

“Nothing ever lasted.” Rob continues. “I met somebody over the summer, a couple of times, but when the season starts, hockey comes first, and…”

“And they don’t understand.”

“Or they don’t want to understand.” Rob looks like he’s a long way away, in his thoughts. “Or they understand it too well.”

Eli has to wonder if Rob’s ever had something with another hockey player.

He finishes his _kossu_ , savouring the way it tastes like home, keeping the empty glass cradled between his palms.

 

It’s Rob who moves first, putting his empty glass down, pulling the two clean glasses towards him and pouring the whisky.

“Swap you.” He offers a glass to Eli in exchange for the empty he’s still holding. Eli takes the trade.

Whisky is something that Eli never drank before he moved here. He’s still getting used to it, but a celebratory dram is something that happens now and again when they’re out. This is a nice one, though, not a basic shots-in-the-bar blend, and Eli thinks that he might come to like it.

“Have you ever…” Rob swirls the whisky in his glass, glances up at Eli and back down as if all the answers are in the dancing liquid. “With a teammate?”

“No.” Eli thinks about it. He doesn’t want to sound too blunt. “I don’t think there was ever…” He can’t think of anybody he’s ever thought might be into guys. “Have you?”

“Once.” Rob takes a gulp of the whisky, which even Eli know isn’t the way you’re supposed to drink one like this. “Sort of.” He looks up to see if Eli’s following. “He was sort of a teammate. Temporarily.”

They all know people like that, passing in and out of your life through trades and transfers, training camps and internationals. Temporary.

“And it didn’t…?” Last? Work out?

“He was…” Rob takes a deep breath, in and out through his nose, like he’s finding his composure. “Older. Straight. Confused.”

Eli huffs half a laugh. The confused ones are never really straight, they just think that they are.

“He’s married now.” Rob admits. “To the girl he was with while we were…” He shakes his head, like he’s physically shaking the memories out. “Anyway, years ago now. But no other hockey players since.”

“Should be easier.” It’s still too hard to look Rob in the eye while they talk. “Should be - there’s somebody who understands what you can’t do, and why you can’t, and it would be the same for them… but then, if it doesn’t work…”

“Either you’re on different teams,” Rob takes over the thread. He’s obviously thought about this too. “And you have schedules that mean you never see each other except when you’re against each other, and you can’t be together around the rinks or the teams, because… Because you can’t.” He doesn’t need to explain that to Eli, Eli understands. “Or you’re on the same team, and if it goes wrong…” He meets Eli’s eyes.

“If it goes wrong…” Eli echoes.

If it goes wrong, you have to carry on in the same locker room, not bringing your heartaches to work, you have to continue to trust and to rely on each other on the ice…

“How do you know, though?” Eli continues, still clinging desperately to the hypotheticals. “What if it could be so good? How would you know, if you can’t try?”

“Eli…”

“What if it didn’t go wrong?”

 

The Glenkinchie is smooth on Eli’s tongue, warm in his chest.

 

“We live together.”

Eli’s pulse kicks up, because Rob’s finally addressing the subject that Eli’s been trying to psych himself up for.

“We work together.” Rob’s trying to meet his eyes, but it’s hard not to glance away. For both of them. “If it turned out to be a bad idea, there’s nowhere to go. Here, hockey…” His glass is empty. Eli didn’t see him finish it. “And there’s Alex.”

Their eyes finally lock, and Eli can’t help the laugh that escapes. Alex. The whole thing is just so… Yes, it would be hard to live with somebody if your relationship failed, and yes it would be hard to work together, and it might feel like it would be impossible to do both, but Alex isn’t their kid.

The tension’s got to Rob, too, and he joins in the laughter.

“I’m sorry.” Eli eventually chokes out, reaching out blindly to push his glass onto the table. “But it’s not the main concern for me, how Alex will feel if his dads get divorced!”

He can’t believe that he’s joking about splitting up with a guy he hasn’t managed to get together with.

“And… It’s January.” By a couple of hours. “We have three months, and a bit.” Everything’s over in this league by mid-April, win or lose. “So on those time scales, even worse-case, it’s not that long to have to get through.”

It’s like whatever it was that was stopping this conversation drained away with the laughter.

If they were together, every week takes them closer to the end of the season, and the more their relationship develops the less time they’d need to survive a breakup before they could go their separate ways.

“Eli...” Rob sounds nervous, hopeful, like he’d never thought that even this conversation could actually happen.

“What if it’s worth the risk?”

And this is it. This is where he has to decide if all the stolen glances, the little moments when they’re just going about their lives, the flirtations they’ve both been listing as harmless, this is where he has to decide if it’s real. Eli knows that he likes Rob, he likes living with Rob, spending time in his company, and he knows that he’s attracted to him, likes to think about him when he’s alone in the dark of his bed and the heat of the shower, and now… Now he has to decide.

Rob’s not looking away any more, not for any longer than it takes for his eyes to move to Eli’s lips and back again.

He’s got to decide too, of course.

Eli really wants to touch his hair.

Right now, in this moment, there’s no reason not to.

 

Rob’s curls are as soft as the bottle in the shower promises that they should be. Eli thinks that Rob might be holding his breath. Eli certainly is, as the curls spring back into place.

“Eli.”

It’s third time Rob’s said his name, and Eli can’t not kiss him any more.

He’s not cautious, but he is gentle, soft. One last bridge where they might turn back and not do this. Rob tastes like the whisky, of course, and he could do with some chapstick, but it’s still… It’s been a long time since Eli kissed somebody he already cared about. One hand on Rob’s shoulder, the other uncertain in his own lap, he goes for a second kiss, and a third. Eli’s eyes are closed, focussed entirely on the way that Rob’s lips move under his, and so it’s only a quiet thud that interrupts them.

Rob pulls back. Eli wants to protest. Not when they got this far, he can’t change his mind and come to his senses now, it’s not _fair…_

Rob leans over and picks up his empty glass from where it’s fallen onto the rug. “Sorry.” He looks sheepish. “I forgot I was holding it.” Eli can only stare at him as Rob puts the glass on the table, stretching so that he can do it without moving his shoulder out from under Eli’s hand. “I’ll stand on it later otherwise.”

Glass safely deposited, Rob turns his full attention back to Eli. His breath is a little quicker, just like Eli’s, and he takes a second just to look before he moves.

Suddenly Eli’s got a lap full of Rob, and nothing to complain about.

 

It’s so much _more_ , like this, Rob with his knees planted either side of Eli’s legs on the couch, his weight on Eli’s thighs. The kisses are heated, almost frantic now that they’re actually doing this, any thought of going slow and gentle is shoved aside and Eli _finally_ gets to bury his hands in Rob’s hair like he’s wanted to for months.

 

Whatever fancy set-up Rob has on the TV just keeps pulling more tracks into this playlist, and so the music is still playing when Eli has to accept that the kisses are getting slower and that he’d be struggling to keep his eyes open if they weren’t already closed for, well, kissing. He pulls back a little and immediately has to stifle a yawn in Rob’s shoulder.

Rob laughs quietly. “I won’t take offence.”

“Sorry.” Eli says, just a beat too late. Then, “I can’t feel my legs.”

Rob laughs again and rolls to the side, landing next to Eli on the couch and letting him stretch his legs out. “It’s quarter past four.”

The air does have that stillness from when the last revellers have gone to bed. The heating must have gone off a while back, and it’s kind of cold. Rob leans in to kiss him again before searching for the remote and turning the TV off. Eli shivers.

“Come on.” Rob stands up and holds out his hand. “I think we should go to bed.”

 

It should break the moment, going through the normal night-time routines, but something about just how late it is preserves the atmosphere. Eli dumps the glasses by the kitchen sink, turns out the light over the stove and goes to lock the front door while Rob takes the bathroom. Rob disappears into his bedroom when they swap, but Eli’s too sleepy and strung out on kissing to worry if he’s just going to shut the door and go to sleep, and by the time he’s washed his hands and turned out the bathroom light behind him, Rob’s room is in darkness and there’s light coming through Eli’s doorway. Eli hasn’t been in there to turn the light on.

He glances through Alex’s doorway as he passes - Alex is snoring softly to reassure them that he’s still alive - and turns out the light in the hallway before going into his room and shutting the door behind him.

The _kossu_ is on the dresser, and Rob is sitting on the end of Eli’s bed, looking just a touch uncertain. He’s tied his hair back. “I’m guessing that’s your side?”

Eli’s phone has been charging on the left side of the bed since he got changed after putting Alex to bed. It’s fully charged now, so he unplugs it.

“Does that work for you?” He pulls the covers back, far enough to expose both sides, and Rob jumps up from the foot of the bed.

“Yes! Yes, that’s good.”

Surely he knows that Eli doesn’t want to sleep in separate rooms?

“Good.” Eli gets into bed, and as soon as he touches the mattress he’s a hundred times more tired. “I don’t want to have move to your bed, we’re here now.”

Rob smiles. “We’re here now.”

Eli closes his eyes as his head hits the pillow, just for a second, just because it’s comfortable. He’s briefly aware of Rob leaning over him to get to the lamp, manages to catch him for another sleepy kiss as he moves back, and then his best intentions to stay awake and enjoy this moment to the fullest are ruined by the weight of the bedding.


	3. Chapter 3

Eli’s alarm goes off first. It wakes Rob up, of course, because that’s the point of alarms, but the mattress shifts next to him and the noise stops. They don’t sleep wrapped up in one another, neither of them subconsciously needing to make sure that the other one doesn’t go anywhere during the night, but it’s not unusual to wake up and find that he’s got an arm wedged under Eli’s pillow.

“Morning.” Eli leans over to kiss whatever part of Rob’s sticking out from the blankets, there’s the now-familiar sensation of Eli stroking his hair, and then the mattress dips and rises as Eli gets up.

Rob would be quite happy to go back to sleep, but like most mornings he just dozes, comfortable under the duvet as the flat comes awake. The shower’s running, and then Eli and Alex are chirping each other about something, and then Rob’s alarm goes off.

He emerges from the bedding just far enough to hit snooze, and burrows right back in.

It’s been really easy to get used to sharing a bed. Rob’s been to bed with a number of guys over the years, but he’s very rarely woken up with them. Even a regular hookup he had for a couple of summers used to get dressed and go once they’d finished their post-coital cuddling.

He woke up with Eli three times before they actually even  _ had _ sex.

Rob’s second alarm goes off, and he snoozes it again.

Maybe it’s because they’d already been living together since August, that they already had more domestic routines than either of them had realises, but sharing a bed had felt totally normal from the first night.

Not that Rob doesn’t get a thrill when he rolls over in the night and gets an armful of Eli, or on the rare occasions he wakes up first and Eli’s sprawled face-down in the pillows, drooling a little. It feels special, but it doesn’t feel like he has to hang onto every second before it all gets torn away.

Rob’s alarm goes for the third time, and he reluctantly sits up. If he sleeps past the third one, Eli will come in and move his alarm so that next time it goes off he’s got no choice but to get up. 

 

It took a whole week for Alex to notice. His hangover was gone by five pm on New Year’s Day, the fucker (Rob doesn’t miss many things about being nineteen, but that’s definitely one), and they’d spent that evening with Alex rolled up in his duvet on one couch and Rob and Eli propped up against each other on the other one. Eli had his hand in Rob’s hair, scratching his scalp like he was a cat, and apparently that sort of behaviour was normal enough that Alex just didn’t notice.

It was a whole week later, when they thought he’d gone out, that Alex walked in on them kissing in the kitchen and swore.

“Fuck’s sake!”

They’d taken half a step apart and then stopped, apparently deciding at the same time that they weren’t going to let anybody make them feel ashamed in their own home. Even if it was his home too.

“Problem?” Eli’s tone was mild and steady and his pulse was hammering under Rob’s fingers. He does that, sounds calm when he’s really not.

Alex stared at them for an endless moment, then threw up his hands and huffed in frustration. “Now I owe Lucie twenty quid!”

 

To give the kid his due, he’d been horrified when he realised that his initial reaction had made them think he was homophobic.

Rob’s never been more conscious of the gay dad jokes than when they sat Alex down at the kitchen table and made him understand that they weren’t telling anybody else.

“It’s not really fair, though, is it.” Alex looked kind of sad when it finally sank in that Rob and Eli couldn’t be open about their relationship outside the walls of their flat.

“No.” Eli’s tone was as calm as always. “It’s not.”

Rob laid his hand over Eli’s, on the table, and Eli tangled their fingers together.

 

Alex still complains that he has the smallest bedroom.

 

Rob pushes the duvet down so that he can sit up properly, steals Eli’s pillows to add to his own (and they are his own, the good pillows have long since migrated in from his room) and picks up his phone to check for messages. The team whatsapp is quiet for a change, and apart from a few insta likes on the picture he posted of Alex cooking last night, his only new message is from Eli’s sister.

Rob met Marja when she came over to visit Eli back in December, back when he and Eli were still convincing themselves that they had to just be friends. The family resemblance was uncanny - Marja’s a couple of years old than Eli with the same pale blond hair and blue eyes, the same bone structure, giving Rob the eerie impression of exactly how Eli might look if he worked out less and his face got a little rounder.

Rob’s pretty fond of Eli’s bone structure.

A couple of weeks into January, Rob had been wandering around the flat trying to find where he’d left his favourite hoodie, and Eli had been talking on Facetime in Finnish which usually meant Marja rather than his parents.

“Hey!” Marja had switched to English when Rob accidentally walked behind Eli. “Let me talk to Rob.”

Somebody who didn’t know Eli as well as Rob does might not have noticed the flicker of panic. Marja laughed and said something in Finnish, and Eli reluctantly passed his phone across. 

Marja turned her full focus on Rob. It’s exactly like Eli’s expression when he’s up next for a penalty shot, except that Rob’s not scared of Eli.

“If you hurt my brother,” Marja told him, her eyes exactly the same blue as Eli’s but somehow a lot colder, “I will find you.”

Eli had gone red, face buried in his hands.

“I’m not going to.” Even afterwards, when the heat of the moment was gone, Rob wasn’t surprised by how much he meant it. He didn’t want anybody to hurt Eli, and there was no way he’d cause that hurt himself.

“Good.” Marja nodded, just once. “Then I am happy for you.” 

“Hey! Is that Marja?” Alex burst into the room, his attention probably attracted by a female voice in the flat, and waved over Rob’s shoulder at the screen.

“Alex! How is my favourite nephew?”

Rob had been only too happy to surrender the phone.

 

He gets messages from her a couple of times a week, usually animal gifs but occasionally she’ll share pictures of the gold that was Eli’s awkward teenage phase. Eli says he hates it when she does that, but he gets this little blush and Rob knows that the embarrassment is outweighed by the knowledge that Rob and Marja get along.

He’s watching a video of a golden retriever trying to catch a frisbee and smashing into the camera instead loop for the third time when Eli pushes the door open, a mug in each hand.

“Morning.” Eli said that earlier, but this time he knows that Rob’s awake. “Getting up?”

“Working on it.” Rob puts his phone aside.

Eli climbs carefully onto the bed, holding the cups steady as he shuffles over to Rob on his knees and folds himself into the space next to him.

“You’ve stolen my pillows again.”

Rob puts his arm around Eli’s shoulders, so he can lean against Rob and take advantage of the pillow stack that way. Eli hums and passes over one of the mugs.

They’re not in a rush. Eli’s a morning person, so he’s up and dressed, and Rob’s really not so Eli’s happy to just sit and cuddle with him now that he knows Rob’s not just going to go straight back to sleep and have to scramble to be on time for training.

Rob glances down at where Eli’s head is resting against his shoulder, even though Eli’s a couple of inches taller than him and it really shouldn’t be comfortable. Eli must feel him looking, because he turns his head and smiles, one of his private smiles that nobody else gets to see, and then taps their mugs together.  _ “Kippis!” _

 

Rob’s not a morning person. Eli’s known that from the very start, when Rob opened the door in just his boxers with the worst bed-hair in history and stared blankly at the unfairly attractive man trying get a huge suitcase and a full kitbag upstairs at once, and then ran away to try to find a t-shirt and the shreds of his dignity instead of actually offering to help. Eli knows that Rob doesn’t get up in the morning for less than three alarm clocks and the threat of having the covers ripped away, but he lets Rob have his three alarms and then he brings him coffee in bed.

That’s the kind of thing that could make a guy fall in love.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was inspired by a comment McSpot left in the draft for the next big Back Up There story, where Rob makes a background appearance. The first part of the comment is redacted for spoilers, but it ended  
>  _“...reminded me that one of my (many, many) dream-fics is to one day see Rob Brooker Find True Love.”_  
>  Hopefully this did the trick.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to docbeeski, as ever, for the beta read and sense-check.


End file.
